For all the flak he’s taken from the Apple tech blogosphere since publishing his Microsoft-commissioned white paper, “What Price Cool?” late last last week, Endpoint Technologies Associates President Roger Kay doesn’t hate Apple. In fact, he still remembers buying his first Mac some 20 years ago.

“I remember my boss coming up to me and he said, ‘You want to pay those prices?’” then, he says. “The argument has always been the same.”

But Kay contends he got his argument right--or as right as he could have, given the assignment. He faults Apple’s “restrictive ecosystem” for driving up the so-called “Apple tax” and isn’t backing down from calling Steve Jobs a bully, but Kay doesn’t think he deserves the blame if anyone thinks the report is unfair.

First of all, he says, Microsoft screwed up the numbers.

“Errors were introduced during production. When the proofs came back to me that were in the final production form, I didn’t actually recheck the information in the graphic element, because I thought they were already put to bed,” he said “I guess what happened was whoever did the final layout literally grabbed the slightly older file.”

Kay, who posted a revised PDF on his website Sunday to accurately reflect the newest MacBook, iMac and Mac Pro specs in the tables--which earned him pans from sites like AppleInsider and others last week--says he butted heads with Microsoft’s “editorial influence” throughout the research and writing of the report, too. And if he hadn’t, the so-called “Apple Tax” might have been a whole lot higher.

“In terms of the software stack, I went over it with them in a fair amount of detail and actually crossed a few things off the list right up front. For example, with the warranty thing, I told them that we need to make sure that there’s a warranty payment on the Windows side. So, we pared that software list down a little.”

And Microsoft was adamant that Kay not give Apple or the Mac OS any credit for its influence over Windows, or dominance over Vista.

“They didn’t want to use the word ‘copy’ because it made Apple look better, like they really were there first.... They kept undermining little places where I used words like “elegance,” and “simplicity,” because they were trying to make sure the point about lower cost took the foreground.

“The only thing I was looking for were ways to mitigate the obvious unfairness of it. I kept pushing back at Microsoft during the editing process.”

While Kay maintains that he didn’t know his “What Price Cool” report was planned as part of a larger-scale, “we-give-more-value-for-the-money” campaign, he readily admits that the study is inherently one-sided and shouldn’t be classified as a white paper. And despite doing his best to ignore the noisy Mac “brownshirts,” he understands their point.

“If someone said to me, ‘Do the other version,’ where you advocate Apple instead, I would probably shave some more of those things off and then say, ‘Yes, there still remains a premium, but you get other things--simplicity, elegance, etc. The robustness of OS X means that the user will spend less time fiddling with their system, and if you take the value of their time and add that in, it goes back the other way.’ So, you could build a pretty good case on the other side as well.”

Still, Kay stands by his overall thesis, flubs and all. “The tactic of finding a flaw and using it to invalidate an entire argument is not intellectually rigorous,” he said.

“After the fact, you think of way you would have done things differently, but you have to live with what’s on the ground. It’ll be like this until the next victim, and then the brownshirts will move on.”